


La Cienaga

by zempasuchil



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-30
Updated: 2009-07-30
Packaged: 2017-10-11 04:13:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/108257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zempasuchil/pseuds/zempasuchil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Pevensies are a close family, living in an old house way out from town, in the jungle on the edge of a swamp.  Fusion fic with La Cienaga, a movie by Argentine director Lucrecia Martel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	La Cienaga

Edmund follows some days but some days Peter wants to be left alone and runs off into the swamp and loses him, some days Peter bullies him down, some days Ed wants nothing more than to lie motionless in the house or outside on the pool deck at his sister's side.

He pets the soft head of the dog while Lucy or Susan sleeps. It starts to sprinkle in the overcast green outdoors and he thinks of Peter, looking up through the jungle leaves at the grey glow of the cloudy sky, an hour or more from home. The forest floor slowly darkening and gleaming with water, darker than the porch steps are. Here where Edmund is curled up in the lawn chair it is dry, though, and dusty-looking. More exposed than the forest, where Peter probably won't notice he's getting wet until it's well and truly pouring.

-

The summers here aren't as sunny as summers should be. They're as hot, though, with warm rain blown in on endless clouds from the south. When the showers start they are all slow to move out of the open, where they hope to catch a breeze from out over the creek.

Today is a still day. They lie stretched out in their bathing suits on white plastic deck chairs.

Thunder rumbles and no one is speaking. Susan drags over a chair and the feet scrape relentlessly at the deck. It is midday, mid afternoon. There is nothing in the house to eat except bread and jam. There is nothing to drink except red wine and the muddy water that trickles pressureless out of the tap. Peter lifts his glass to his lips and they pucker at the dark dryness.

You're too young to have any, he says to Edmund who protests at being babied even though their parents aren't there. He watches Peter and Susan drink glass after glass sitting there on the deck, growing sleepier and sleepier. Lucy, though, Lucy doesn't care. She just lies and reads her book.

You're too young, too young, but Edmund doesn't hear words he just sees Peter's purple lips and squinting glare, Susan's sanctimonious nod and stumble and hand on Peter's burnt shoulder.  
They are still, still, still. They lose momentum bit by bit in that afternoon and settle into inertia. Edmund can't breathe for all the still heat, for the air that goes unstirred, for the rain that doesn't fall, for the swamp that is strangely silent for something so alive.

He would give anything for some ice.

-

Edmund dreams of cold, thinks of mountains and thin air that's fresh to breathe, not this stagnant stuff rising off the surface of the slimy pool. He looks up to where he knows they are but all he sees are clouds.

Mountains? Lucy asks. What's so great about mountains?

But no matter how much he runs through the jungle he can never stretch his legs enough. No matter how far he goes with Peter Peter will never let him go far enough. Far away from this heat. He brought up moving once and Peter looked at him like he was an idiot, Susan like he had his head in the clouds, Lucy like it was betrayal.

-

It's another still day when Edmund emerges from the swamp with the dog in his arms. Its ear is torn and bleeding freely; it's whimpering, and Edmund has arms covered in scratches. He won't hand the dog to Lucy, keeping it in the crook of his elbow, slamming the closet doors open.

I'm going, he says, and Lucy begs and pleads for him not to but just stands there as he grabs shirts and throws them on the bed. Susan looks at him with all her sadness in her eyes. They don't know where Peter is or when he'll be back. He was the one who this was meant for, it's not his sisters he wants to leave, but here they are, and Peter's already left first.

Lucy tries to stand in front of Edmund as he takes his clothes from the closet. She is crying close to screaming in anger and fear, but he ignores it all.

Go take a shower, he says, not without gentleness. You've been in that swimsuit for days.

And while she's there Edmund goes out to the gate where She is waiting, pale even in her white dress, even while they are all browning. Lucy peers out the window and sees him leaving, the smallest dog under his arm. He's going and she can't bring herself to step out of the lukewarm rush of running water - movement she hasn't felt for weeks and weeks. Her whole body feels heavy; the gig is up.

She knows Peter is gone, knows because the boots weren't there by the door this morning. She doesn't see Susan; she knows she's standing guard at the door.

-

It's late when Peter, really late, but as soon as Susan tells him (Lucy's fallen asleep crying, curled up in her sister's bed) Peter gets in the car and goes to town to find him. He asks around and ends up in a place where the lights are too dim and the air conditioning is blasting. One of the guys at the bar turns and snarls at him, asks what he wants, threatening and threatened.

Peter describes Edmund for him but doesn't give him a name. Runaway from the campo, he says. Teenager. He's got family looking for him. Last seen with this tall woman, all white.

The guy turns to his buddy, a stocky guy, and says, Hey, Enano, you hear this? Guy's looking for some freckly dark-haired twink. You know anything about that?

Enano grimaces and squints from under bristling eyebrows. What, pale, skinny? Saw him with the bruja, he says; Peter nods. Not here. North. She big in these parts; built an empire on the white stuff. He rubs his nose significantly.

When were they here? Peter asks.

Don't know.

He opens his mouth again and sees their faces turn ugly. He's asked enough questions. Thanks, he says, standing and paying for his beer.

-

They are all alone in the house, Susan and Lucy, drifting to and from their beds and the deck chairs, day and night. They forget to eat most of the time – Susan tries to remember but most of their clocks are broken, what do they need clocks for here anyway, and so meals go on ignored. They lie in bed together at nights but rarely can they sleep. It's not the still heat or the thunderstorm but the distinct absences in the house, in their lives. It's the empty beds. It's the spots of dog's blood on the floor of the room.

One night Susan dozes off eventually but Lucy just can't, and the thunder rolls, and she suddenly feels suffocated in the little bed, trapped in the room. She gets up and goes to the deck outside, switching on the light. Closing the door behind her, she turns and stops suddenly. There's a cat lying on the chair closest to her, a long dusty cat with huge muddy paws and golden eyes.

She stares at it and it stares at her. It might be speaking or she might be dreaming. It begins to rain and suddenly she can breathe deep, like a drop in pressure, a hand that stops pressing her chest and making it hard to move. The cat leaps up and slowly walks under the eaves where Lucy stands; casually it – he – rubs against her shins. She gingerly reaches down to touch him and he lets her put her hand on his shoulders for a moment before moving away, returning to circle her legs.

She opens the door and he looks at her fully before walking in; she leaves it open so the cooler rainy air will drift in.

-

He comes and goes and they learn not to close the doors when it's not necessary. Lucy tries to feed him but he won't take any food – he hunts, Susan says, but Lucy's never seen him drag in anything like cats will. When Peter comes back he kisses Susan and holds Lucy, and then he sees the cat, or the cat sees him, sitting tall on the deck chair.

Peter opens his mouth to ask but no words come out. There is only silence. Finally the cat leaps down and comes to Peter, rubs his head once against the leg of his jeans, and bounds off into the jungle, not to be seen again for days.

A benediction, Lucy thinks, and knows Peter is thinking it too.

-

He comes back alone in the night. They hear the door open and shut, and even though he's quiet they all hear it as though it echoes through the house, they have been listening for it for so long. He walks in with his face all messed up, a black eye and both lips split. He is still cradling the dog with a tattered ear, nursing a broken paw now. Susan and Lucy rush to hold him but don't when they see the dog, and Peter stands in the door behind them, supporting himself on the knob with a shaking wrist. They stand apart as he walks to the corner of the den and lays the dog down so, so gently. Lucy brings bandages and Edmund wraps the dog's paw while she dabs ointment on his face, applies the band aids.

He makes it a bed out of his shirts and sits there watching over it, making sure the dog doesn't worry his bandages. Lucy sits glued to his side. Susan leaves and returns with a sandwich, which he eats hungrily. When Ed does have to leave the dog's side and no one is looking, Peter crouches down by it and feeds it scraps of meat. The little dog wolfs them down and Peter's taught face nearly breaks with relief.

Only when the dog is asleep, only a little after sunrise, does Edmund get up and crawl into bed. Lucy crawls in with him, and then in a few minutes Susan is there too, and finally Peter comes and curls around all their heads, touching Edmund's chest, feeling his shoulder, his neck, his hair, his forehead, finally resting a hand in Susan's hair and a hand in Lucy's, while his lips are buried in Edmund's dark curls.

For a long while, for a few days, he won't speak. They don't pry and he never does tell them what happened.

-

The cat came back and crawled onto his bed in the night. Peter was there but half asleep, barely saw the tall silhouette perched on Edmund's chest. Everything was quiet. In the morning he swore it was a dream but Edmund said, Who was he?

Lucy's swamp cat, Peter says.

When Ed asks her Lucy raises her eyebrows. He's not mine, she says. You saw him, you know. He's not a tame cat.

Edmund's silence is in agreement.

-

And so. She goes to town when she has to get some food, something other than wine and meat and jam, and she lingers a while longer than she needs to. She sees people on the street. She meets, one day, an old friend of the family who tells her how she's grown and the way he looks at her makes her feel special, makes her wish that Peter would look at her that way when she gets back to the house and he wolfs down the cheese sandwich she made him.

-

The song on the radio changes in the crackle and suddenly there's a little unspeakable magic. Their bodies, still for so long, twitch, adjusted to the air, feeling about. She sees Peter restlessly tousle his hair, come over to lean in the doorway. He lounges, sensuous tilt of the hips, head tipped back to show his throat and all its dips and curves of the tendons and cartilage. His wicked slow grin. Lazily Susan smiles too as Lucy jumps up and takes his hands, begs him to dance. His concession is laughing, not quite laughter but a voice that is full of so much more than words, when he lifts Lucy's hand and places his hand on the small of her back, and Susan catches his eye as he holds Lucy close. She turns the radio up.

Edmund is there standing behind him, moving his hips and holding his arms up mimicking Peter, and Susan laughs, really laughs, and Lucy does too. He moves close to Peter, putting his arms over his arms, his hands nearly reaching his hands where they hold Lucy but Peter's still taller, Peter's arms are still longer, his hands larger. Two boys pressed together, moving like one boy, mirror images light and dark, the same but not the same.

Lucy and Edmund can't see that his eyes are only for her, and she, she sees, now in a blink, a flicker, now lingering on his body, now meeting his gaze with her own dark one.

-

She is folding laundry in the morning and he comes in and looks at her in the white morning light of thin cloud cover. Today, it is almost sunny.

He asks her to make him a sandwich for lunch, he's going out into town. Business. He sells what they don't eat of the things he hunts, or at least he says he does. Edmund's been the only one reckless enough to ask.

Make it yourself, she says.

Pleeease, he says, mock-whining, and so she mock-harrumphs and says No, and that's final.  
With a wicked grin and sudden speed he grabs a pair of her just-washed underwear from her hands, saying I'll just eat these, then.

She yelps and grabs back at them, and he leaps backward and away. Jumping to her feet, she upsets the piles of folded things she had sitting on her knees.

You'll eat your hat, she says, making another swipe.

Fine then. And he takes off his leather cap, holds it between his teeth, and puts her underwear on his head for all the world like a three-year-old child. Shrieking, she lunges, and he dances away like lightning.

Susan chases him through the tall grass wet with dew, down toward the sluggish muddy river. They are almost at its banks when Peter half-turns to look back and she sees her chance. She jumps him there and they crash over each other onto the ground, Susan's arms around his hips, Peter's arms wrapped around her head and shoulders. Their hands reach to the ground to break their fall and Peter's body cushions her impact. All is silent except for the slippery noise of the grass as they crush it, both of their grunts as they fall, their panting for breath. Sharp gasps of laughter come out after their grins, laughter like breathing, like running out of breath.

She exhales hot on his abdomen where she drops her head against his body. He lifts his eyes and sees a glimpse of blue in the sky, and when she clambers over him to snatch her panties from his head and stands up, he is disappointed that it has ended so soon. Couldn't they have laid there a little longer? What hurry could they possibly be in? He wants to grab her waist again and pull her off her feet, back down to the ground, to the cradle they've pressed in the grasses.

Instead, he accepts her hand up. It is only because she is his sister.

-

Lightning strikes and thunder crashes in the summer night and Susan has to shout to say anything, but Edmund still can't hear her in the same room. On the other side of the house, Lucy runs into Peter's room and jumps onto his bed in fear. He wraps his arms around her and holds her hot thin child's body close.

There are not enough beds in the house for each of them to sleep alone. They never talk about it but they feel mutually assured that the other likes it this way. Plenty of times they disentangle themselves from each other's grasps in the night sticky with heat and go to get some fresh air and pace the deck. Plenty of times they don't come back to the same bed the next night and there is usually someone who will sleep alone. But there is always someone with someone.

The only times there isn't is when Peter is gone, or when Susan is gone, or when Lucy is gone. Edmund doesn't leave at nights anymore, not since; then, the rest of them slept together every night.

Where is she going? he asks one day. Peter shrugs, hunched over his rifle at the table as he cleans it. Susan looks up and says, She met a girl in the swamp who says she lives nearby.

None of them know of any homes within a day's walk.

A girl?

Peter says, Oh, that girl. Lucy was telling me, he coughs. She was telling me she has the same eyes as the cat.

What? Edmund says. She didn't tell me.

Oh. Peter doesn't look up from his gun. Susan shrugs and goes back to reading.

-

Hey.

The guy taps Peter on his shoulder. The music in the club is too loud for Peter to hear what's being said, so he leaves the girl to his buddy and walks to the edge of the floor.

Hey, where's your sister?

Peter freezes, face blank. I don't know what – I don't know you, he says instead.

Yeah, well I know her, and you're a Pevensie if I ever saw one. He bares his teeth in an unfriendly grin.

Listen, Peter says. What do you want with me. Who are you.

Shrug. Name's Lobo. Just wanted to see your sister. Though I guess she's out with her guy.

What, Peter says, frozen again.

Her man. Don't tell me you didn't –

You've got the wrong one. My sister doesn't date.

The hell she doesn't, Lobo snorts, and misinterpreting the look on Peter's face bursts into hard barks of laughter. Maybe she don't, he says. Maybe she just likes this guy all over her. Maybe she just likes guys putting their hands up her dress on the dance floor.

Shut the fuck up. You don't fucking know my sister.

But you know, huh? Close family, out there in the jungle. You know what she likes. What does she like up her dress, Pevensie?

Peter's fist cuts him off with a sharp thud, followed by a second as the guy hits the floor, followed by a third and fourth and fifth as the guy's friends who've surrounded Peter land their own punches.

It takes the bouncer just enough time to get over there for Lobo to get up, land a punch of his own that breaks Peter's nose, and for Edmund to come up and hit the guy in the gut, before they all get thrown out on their asses.

The blood's pretty bad.

-

She wakes up to Peter being dragged in with the dawn.

Susan and Edmund lay him on the bed where his bloody head lolls in unconsciousness. He's stopped bleeding and so now it's dried all over his face from where they split his lip and broke his nose.

They lie his head on a pillow and with some trouble arrange his long limbs in some sort of less-skewed fashion. Once they've done that they stop and look at his prone form.

Reaching for the cuffs of his jeans, Susan says, "He's filthy," as if to preclude her action but really Edmund can see that it's an afterthought: she's operating with a determination characteristic of a move rehearsed or impatiently contemplated, mouth in a line, eyes sharp. He soundlessly unbuttons Peter's jeans and she tugs, hard, reaching for the waist to pull them off. Edmund only hesitates a moment before removing Peter's bloodied shirt as well.

Under the white morning light he is paler than they thought he was. Under the smears of black dried blood, he is paler.

-

There are good days and there are bad ones. Peter leaves. Susan lounges. Lucy disappears, they shrug as if they don't know where, but everyone knows. Edmund thinks about disappearing but he doesn't. He follows his siblings less and less, only going to the outer edges of the swamp, only walking slowly looking up at the trees, down at the mushrooms.

The sun is slanting long and low one afternoon when he comes back to find Lucy crying into her pillow. The swamp cat has come and gone. When he asks her, though, she shakes her head.

That night, her cheeks shining and teary in the moonlight, she crawls into bed with him. He whispers into her hair and combs it gently with his fingers. What is it. Who did this, Lu.

Oh Edmund, she breathes wetly. What's wrong with me? What's so right with her?

He can only hold her tightly in response.

-

Susan manages to distract her some days. While Peter and Ed are gone, she takes Lucy's hand and drags her along outside. They climb up the grassy mound and down the steep bank to the crick that comes down through the mountains and into the swamp. At this point it's plenty muddy, but sluggish as it is it still moves, and Susan is pretty sure that means it's cleaner than their old scum-lined pool.

In the tall grass Susan takes off her shirt with a mischievous grin, and slowly the same smile creeps over Lucy's face and she follows suit.

Naked as jaybirds they splash in, giggling and giddy. They paddle around some in the waist-deep water and find a log on the bottom. They try balancing on it but it's so slick with mud that after a few seconds of crouched wobbling Susan yelps and splashes in. Lucy grins and tries her own luck. She walks up faster and stays more upright, and she gets further, but she can hardly stay on any longer. They are covered in a sheen of brown silt, tinting them like sepia, and when Peter and Edmund both emerge from the jungle there they are, heads bobbing, hair and face and shoulders as brown as the two little dogs that accompany the brothers. Peter stands there at the top of the raised finger of land, a root extending from the mountain, and laughs quietly, but Edmund starts with a grin and lopes downhill.

Susan sees him and splashes from the water, yelling something Peter can't hear. Edmund just laughs and shucks off his shorts at the edge, jumping in so the spray he sends up hits Lucy. When he surfaces Susan ducks his head under and Lucy crows with victory.

-

Susan is showering, trying to scrub the little bits of grit and plant matter off, but they're tiny so they stick to her skin even still. The window is open but the door is closed. He's in there too, washing the dirt off his face but the rest of him is still filthy from the swamp. He sticks his leg in, and she nudges it with hers as if to say "move it, it's my turn" but Peter doesn't move. Instead he sticks his arm into the stream of water and she doesn't swat away his blindly waving hand but ducks her head and quirks the corner of her mouth, looks up with sly eyes and takes it, pulls. Pulls his dirty stumbling body in.

-

It is a good day, she thinks, curled next to his body under the pale light from the window.

It is a good day, she thinks, and he holds her as they dance slow to the old music on the radio. The singer pours out the vowels of a strange fluid language not their own, in a voice warmer than anything she's heard, warmer than the wine in her belly.

It is a good day, she thinks, and it will stand up against more than a few of the bad ones.

-

But in the end he heads out again with the dogs, his rifle and the dogs, on a hot afternoon when the cloudcover feels thinner, the air yet stiller. He doesn't come back that night, no matter how long Susan stays up sitting with a light in the window.

"Come to bed," Lucy calls.

She doesn't listen.

-

And so in the end Susan can't take much more of this. Peter is away, Edmund is out wandering or lying silently curled up around an animal, Lucy is gone and enamored. As soon as Peter is here he is gone and she can't take this house, can take some of the still days but not all of them, less and less now, can't take the torpor, the thunder, living in their swimsuits, living off rare meat and wine and jam.

Her trips to town become more than trips; she lingers in a classy air conditioned bar where he buys her a drink. At a department store counter she tries a perfume and he smells her hand, lips brushing against her wrist, says he likes it. She buys it later when she's by herself, and whenever she wears it, Peter isn't there to notice. The day he pushes his nose against her shoulder, into the hollow of her throat where her jaw meets her neck, asks if she's wearing anything, she turns her head the other way.

-

When he calls, the friend of their mother's, one night, he says he's in town again. She sits in her room and talks to him and laughs and Edmund winces to hear how her voice can sound like syrup one minute and glass shards the next. She sits in the room with her door closed. Lucy pets the soft animals and Peter steps outside to smoke under the eaves where the rain can't get to him. He isn't wearing a shirt and to Edmund's eyes he looks impossibly brown, standing against the peeling white house paint.

-

When Susan leaves she leaves and it's quiet, preceded by secretive phone calls they all know about. She was sleeping by herself more these days. If Lucy climbed in, Susan would nudge her out and tells her she's old enough to sleep by herself.

She leaves in the night and it takes them too long to notice, because it's too humid to move. She doesn't come back all that stifling day

and Peter goes out into the swamp with his gun

and Lucy lounges by the pool eating bread and jam, thinking of a girl with golden eyes, thinking again of jumping into the water to escape this heat

and Edmund lies there with her, stroking the cat and dreaming of winter.


End file.
